Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this manuscript, the authors summarize the main results obtained during the second phase of the Borexino experiment.

The paper is clearly presented and contains results of interest for the scientific community. However, a few points have to be addressed by the authors before I can recommend it for publication.

1) In lines 41-42, the authors say

"The first solar neutrino detector was built at the end of the 1960s in the Homestake mine in South Dakota in order to confirm the SSM."

However, I think this statement is not totally correct, since at that time there was no such a thing as a Standard Model of the Sun. Besides that, solar neutrinos had not been detected at any experiment yet. Therefore, it should be more correct saying

"... in order to detect solar neutrinos".

2) In line 42, the authors say

"Kamiokande was a real-time solar neutrino detector ..."

But this is not exact. Indeed, Kamiokande was designed to observe the decay of the proton, and it became a very successful detector for solar, atmospheric and supernova neutrinos. Then, it should be  more accurate saying

"Kamiokande was a real time neutrino detector ..."

3) In the list of radiochemical experiments using gallium as target material, the authors forget the GNO experiment.

4) The authors should check the sentence between lines 74 and 75.

5) Likewise, this sentence

"This effect depends on the refraction of neutrinos in matter, the resonance and the

adiabaticity and it is described in terms of the flavors and the relative phases of eigenstates and the transitions between eigenstates."

should be revised since it is very confusing.

6) The acronym SSS is not defined in the text.

7) I can not understand the text in Section 5. Is there any figure missing?

Author Response

1) In lines 41-42, "... in order to detect solar neutrinos". DONE

 

2) In line 42 (actually line 48),"Kamiokande was a real time neutrino detector ..." DONE

 

3) I added a note saying “After the end of GALLEX, the Gallium Neutrino Observatory or GNO, started in April 1998”

 

4) The authors should check the sentence between lines 74 and 75. If the reviewer refers to the sentence “This matter enhancement effect was first proposed by 
Wolfenstein and then reprised by Mikheyev and Smirnov, it is now called MSW effect [22,23].”I do not understand what it’s wrong. The sentence sound good and also the two references are correct.

 

5) the sentence "This effect depends on the refraction of neutrinos in matter, the resonance and th adiabaticity and it is described in terms of the flavors and the relative phases of eigenstates and the transitions between eigenstates." has been changed with “Electron neutrinos have different interactions with matter compared to muon or tau neutrinos flavours. In particular, electron neutrinos can have both charged current and neutral current elastic scattering with electrons, while muon or tau neutrinos have only neutral current interactions with electrons. ”

 

6) The acronym SSS is not defined in the text. It’s true! I put it in line 97

 

7) I can not understand the text in Section 5. Is there any figure missing? Sorry I forget to uncommented the \includegraphics[width = 0.5\textwidth]{peeHZ.pdf}

\includegraphics[width = 0.5\textwidth]{peeLZ.pdf}. Now the two figures mentioned in the text are visible.

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Paper describes with some details both the Borexino detector, the physics reach and the analysis done. It would be useful to spell out the binned likelihood function mentioned at line 153 and specify how the systematic and statistical errors are propagated in the fit. The 4 factors that are included in the multivariate approach will share some degree of correlation and in the text right now there are errors but with no explanation.

Author Response

In order to better explain the procedure of the binned likelihood function and the quoted error I add the sentence: “Table 2 summarizes the interaction rates of solar neutrinos while in table 3 are reported the 
decay rates of background species, both rates are obtained by averaging the results of the analytical 
and MC approaches” and I put 3 tables taken from the 2 papers on arXiv in refeneces (i.e. M.Agostiniet al. arXiv:1709.00756v1 [hep-ex]
M.Agostini et al. arXiv:1707.09278v2 [hep-ex]) from which the this proceeding is based. The reason why these three tables were not in this proceeding is due to the fact that the two article in arXiv are now published in Nature just one weal ago and there was an embargo on all plots and figures. Now that the article is published (see NATURE vol. 562 505-510 (2018)) I was allowed to insert these 3 tables in this paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf